Hornsby Concert Crowd Reflected Face Of History

Jim Spencer

January 02, 2000|By JIM SPENCER Daily Press

My millennial moment came shortly before 11 p.m. on New Year's Eve. Williams-burg-born rock star Bruce Hornsby had invited anyone to join him on stage at William and Mary Hall. A couple hundred people, most of them locals, took him up on the offer. Together, they grooved to a song that Hornsby had written about the playground-basketball heroics of 1970s W&M star John "Rainbow" Lowen-haupt.

Relaxed and smiling broadly, Hornsby toted a huge white accordion through a dancing throng made up of, essentially, his extended neighbors. He strolled effortlessly where there seemed no room to take a single step. Time and again, his fans parted, then enveloped him, like Chesapeake Bay around a waterman's skiff - another local subject to which Hornsby has given artistic expression.

Hornsby appeared to climb atop his piano to hover above the adoration. At the same time, he extolled a jump shooter whose place in history never extended much beyond Busch Gardens on the east and Toano on the west.

Here was the sense of community that ensured the celebration of 1,000 years.

The explosion of lights on the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the 16 barges burping fireworks into the night over London's Thames River, the Washington Monument aglow, even the splash of the Times Square ball into a sea of humanity merely paid homage to the substance of our success. Civilization sustained owed its greatness to individual relationships based upon mutual respect that grew into a collective conscience.

I'm not sure that anyone else at Hornsby's performance shared my epiphany. If not, I trust that they found something else, which is actually appropriate. While Hornsby sang of Lowenhaupt, I thought of another William and Mary man, albeit a tad less notorious than the mighty Rainbow. Playwright and playwriting professor Lou Catron taught me that you get to the universal through the specific.

Surely, that's what we did in making it this far.

The whole of humanity depends on the integrity of its parts. Where I looked Friday night, from the stage to the bleachers, I found examples. The Hornsby show attracted everybody: The youngest fans arrived in strollers, the oldest on canes.

Roaming jugglers, stilt-walkers and a single fire-eater lent a carnival atmosphere.

"Look," joked a unicyclist who tipped his cycle as he ran over a curb outside the arena before the show, "it's the first crash of Y2K."

First and last, as far as I was concerned. Faith in institutions and people kept me from hoarding toilet paper and canned peas as New Year's Eve approached. Aside from a rotating stage and all the other technological bells and whistles of a pop- music performance, Hornsby's concert on the dreaded night itself provided plenty of hope.

For one thing, 20-something years ago, I actually played in a pick-up basketball game with the great Lowen-haupt.

Familiarity counts.

On New Year's Eve, celebrants wandered throughout William and Mary Hall unhassled by ushers. When the lights went down, nobody cared whether you moved to a better - perhaps even more expensive - seat, so long as that seat was unoccupied.

The deal was simple: Nobody was looking to get over on anybody. I left my suede jacket and my cell phone unattended in the mezzanine for several hours while my wife and I roamed the arena, stood on the floor near the stage, then migrated into some empty lower-level seats. My jacket and phone were still there when I returned.

The dance floor beyond the rotating stage stayed packed in a demographic mishmash outfitted in everything from denim to satin and tie-dye to black tie. The tragically hip brushed hard up against the rhythm-challenged without a spark of recrimination.

Meanwhile, Hornsby proved himself to be simultaneously a musician whose talents have earned him millions and a gentle soul whose roots have provided the inspiration for a remarkable body of work.

He wondered how many of his listeners remembered a particular interracial romance that scandalized Williamsburg. He wondered who remembered the house of ill repute on Penniman Road. Hornsby remembered both and turned them into songs.

This sense of place allowed a rock star with several recordings, who toured with The Grateful Dead, who has written hit songs for performers like Don Henley and Huey Lewis, to find a place on stage for his brother to play bass for a couple of numbers, then for his young twin sons to bang some drums, then for his wife to take snapshots of the kids with their dad as the clock struck 12.

"I'm an indulgent parent," Hornsby told the crowd.

On New Year's Eve, he was also a timely example of the debt that fame owes to things mundane.

He played as if he were in his den, not in an arena with 4,000 people.

The best way to describe Hornsby's performance at the turn of the century and the start of a new millennium was "down-home."

He shared history exactly as it should be shared, offering his stage to an audience of apparent nobodies who, in fact, created the limelight.

Jim Spencer can be reached at 247-4731 or by e-mail at jlspencer@dailypress.com or Talk Back to Jim Spencer at http://dailypress.com/spencerfeedback.htm